The Squares of the City (9 page)

“The problem with Sigueiras, of course, is that he managed to fiddle the undisputed use of that land under the monorail central as part of his citizens’ rights endowment, and it’s legally unassailable. The only loophole lies in the proviso that the city council retains powers of development, and it can dispossess any leaseholder on payment of compensation. Well, what we’ve got to try to do is dispossess Sigueiras—using this city development clause.”

Caldwell had been listening in mounting excitement to Angers; now he burst out as though unable to control himself any longer.

“We’ve
got
to get him out. Everybody s-says we must! The health problems are gh-ghastly; the education department is t-terribly worried; it’s affecting the tourists—it’s sh-shocking, Mr. Hakluyt!”

I got up. “Look,” I said, “for the last time. You hired me to do a job, and I’m going to do it if it can be done. I don’t have to be
told
that this slum development is a blot on the face of Ciudad de Vados—I can
see.
Suppose you try to be patient—and better still, let me get on with the work.”

I was leaving the traffic department building when I had my first sight of
el Presidente
in person—from a distance, but unmistakable. Well, how could one mistake him when he drove down the street and into the Plaza del Norte behind a flying wedge of black-uniformed motorcyclists with police sirens howling?

He sat in the back of an open convertible, one arm resting along the side. Next to him was a dark and very beautiful girl—his second wife, presumably. His first, so I had vaguely heard, was a girl he had married in his twenties and who had died soon after the foundation of Ciudad de Vados. He looked older than he had in the photograph at the airport, even behind the dark glasses that hid his eyes.

There was no doubt that he was still popular. People on the sidewalks and in the middle of the square stopped talking to turn and wave at the passing cavalcade, and a bunch of children ran yelling behind his car.
El Presidente
acknowledged the acclaim with no more than a languid lift of his hand, but his wife smiled and blew kisses at the children.

The car pulled up outside the City Hall, and Vados went inside—to attend to his mayoral duties, presumably. As soon as he had disappeared from sight, his wife leaned forward and said something to the driver; still attended by the motorcycles, the car purred off in the direction of the main shopping streets.

I strolled away, deep in thought, when the interruption was over. Angers, plainly, hadn’t much liked my parting remarks; it was certain that if he got to hear about my actions for the next few days, he wasn’t going to approve of that, either. I intended to spend the immediate future on foot, looking at the places I was supposed to clear up, with a camera slung around my neck, a white Panama hat on my head, and the biggest dark glasses I could find on my nose.

And, in direct contradiction to Angers’ request, I proposed to concentrate first on what I considered the major problem: the street market and the attendant slum area. Sigueiras’s set of pigsties were not in fact essentially a traffic problem; if there were as many people who wanted to get rid of them as Caldwell had claimed, they could be cleared away on the basis of something little stronger than a pretext. But to get rid of the market was going to call for some rather subtle and organic planning.

I’d arrived on Tuesday; today was Friday. The market area deserved at least three days’ close study, and the fact that I would have the end and beginning of the working week in the period meant that I would see it in both its busiest and slackest moments, which was ideal.

The slackest period of all, of course, was Sunday—there was no market at all, and I concentrated on the outward and return flow of cars bearing people out of town for the day. But with that interruption, I stayed in and around the market area until Monday evening; three or four times a day I worked my way through the market and its surrounding streets, noting the volume of traffic on foot and on wheels at different times of day, estimating how many people had to pass this way, anyway, how many came here only because the market was here, and how many might come this way if it weren’t for the market and the resulting low character of the neighborhood.

There were valuable pointers to public opinion, too, to be followed up—sources of irritation and resentment against the market that could be gently magnified until it became possible to decree it out of existence without opposition.

It was fascinating. But then I’m one of those lucky people to whom it is given to enjoy his regular job. There are so many aspects of human existence reflected in the way people move through their streets. I’d had to allow for the snarls in traffic flow caused by the muezzins in Moslem cities calling the devout to prayer, and the consequent five-times-daily interruption of everything, much to the annoyance of the nonreligious citizens. I’d had to work out a design for an embankment along the Ganges where it was certain that at least a million people would suddenly turn up once a year, but which had to cope with them and with its ordinary traffic without wasting unduly much space on the million-strong crowd which would remain idle the rest of the year. I’d helped develop the signal system in Galveston, Texas, designed to get every fire appliance within twenty miles nonstop to any outbreak without interfering with traffic on any route not used by the engines. Those were large-scale tasks, and they had their own interest. But this—by comparison—half-pint puzzle was equally intriguing.

By Monday afternoon I was coming to a tentative conclusion.

I was wandering along the sidewalk, pausing to turn over things displayed for sale and rechecking my guess about how many people came this way just to do their shopping when the offices and businesses nearby closed for the night, when a hoarse voice called out to me.

“Ay, señor!”

I glanced around. The only people in the direction from which the yell had come were two shabby old men deep in thought over a chessboard resting on an empty packing case—I saw that the white king was lost or broken and had been replaced by the neck of a bottle, broken off short and stood on its jagged end—and a fat man in a white suit that was soaked with sweat under the arms. He sat on a rickety chair tilted back against the wall. A hat shaded his plump face; one pudgy hand clutched a bottle of some sickly-colored soft drink with a straw in it; the other held a ropy cigar.

I looked inquiring; he beckoned; I went over to him. As I came up, he said something in rapid Spanish, and I had to ask for a repeat.

“Ah, that’s all right,” he said with a sudden surprising switch into strong New York. “Figured you weren’t one of these stuck-up spicks. Tourist?”

I nodded; that was my role at the moment.

“Drink?” he suggested, and before I could accept or refuse, he had thrown back his head and yelled, “Pepe!”

I looked at the nearest doorway and found that I was in fact standing outside a shabby bar, converted in makeshift fashion from the entrance hall of a house. A misspelled name scrawled on the wall in black paint announced the fact.

“What’ll it be?” said the fat man.

“Something long and cool,” I said in my best tourist manner, wiping my face.

The fat man snorted. “In a hole like this? Pal, if they had a frigidaire here, they’d have to use it for cooking tamales. The power company cut the supply a month ago. Makes it a choice between beer and this muck I’m drinking. Better have beer—at least it doesn’t get dirty inside the cans.
Cerveza
!” he added sharply as a worried little man appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on an apron or maybe the flapping tail of his shirt.

“Siddown,” he went on, indicating a folding chair propped against the wall near him. “Reason I called you over was ’cause I figure I’ve seen you around here a few times before. Didn’t I?”

“You might have,” I acknowledged, finding that the chair, seemingly on the point of collapse, was still strong enough to take my weight. I hadn’t seen him; that I was sure of. But I didn’t comment on the fact.

“You seem to be spending a hell of a lot of time down here.” His eyes fixed on me. “Mind my askin’ why? Sort of—uh—unusual for a tourist.”

“A girl I know back home told me to get her one of those fancy Indian shawls—
rebozos,
” I answered, thinking in high gear. “You know how it is,” I added, trying to make the words imply I thought he was irresistible to every girl for miles. “I wanted to make it something—something classy, if you get me. Can’t find anything I like.”

The fat man spat with great deliberation into the gutter, three inches from the bare feet of a woman carrying a basket of clay pots. “Should think not. Stuff you get here’s not worth a damn. You’d do better to stop off for a couple hours in Mexico City on your way home an’ spend a few bucks in a big store there. These people can’t afford to spin their own thread any more, y’see. Have to make do with lousy commercial stuff—won’t dye properly, won’t weave the same way. No good.”

“Looks like I’ve been wasting my time, then,” I said. Beer arrived, brought by the worried man; I took it as it was—in the can—and sipped it.

“Maybe not altogether. Get better stuff here than anywhere else in Vados, that’s for sure. And cheaper. Trying to clear this market away—hear about that?”

“No!” I said, feigning astonishment. “Why? Don’t people like having a genuine Indian-style village market right in the heart of Vados? I’d have thought tourists would go for it in a big way.”

“Nuts. Vados is
‘the
—most—modern—city—inaworld.’ ” He managed to make the slogan sound faintly obscene. “That’s what tourists come looking for. Old-world crap they can find back in New Mexico or somewhere. What they want here is the day afer tomorrow, not the day before yesterday. ’Sides, the place stinks. Don’t it?”

The smell was pretty thick, and likewise indescribable. Cooking oil and frijoles and rotting fruit and human bodies all had a place in it. So did sun on dust, which smells like nothing else in the world.

“What are these poor bastards gonna do for a living when they clear this market up? Hafta live in that dump of Sigueiras’s—they don’t show
that
to tourists. Heard about it?”

“Under the main monorail station?”

“Tha’s right.” He looked at me with a speculative expression. “For a tourist, you got eyes, pal—say that for you. Guess you didn’t go down inside, though.” I shook my head. “Guessed right. There’s a guy called Angers in a city traffic department been shooting off his mouth about cleaning out market, shacks, whole damn lot. Him an’ that money-grabbing bum Seixas.”

He gestured with his now empty bottle; he had been sucking enormous gulps between sentences. The movement took in the big-eyed children and the back-bowed women and the shabby men playing chess, the barrows and the baskets and the fruit and corn and clay pots and trinkets. “Riles me! I’m a citizen, same as Angers. I got my stake here, same as him. But it’s these poor bastards’ own damn country, and they don’t get much of a share.”

On the last word he hurled the empty bottle at a rotten melon lying in the gutter; it sank in without breaking and stuck up at an angle, the straw still in the neck. “Have another on me?” I suggested.

“Next time you’re by,” he said, and hauled himself ponderously to his feet. “Got to go make room for it before I have another. Think about Angers while I’m doing it. Maybe we’ll fix him one of these days. Still a law in this country—of sorts. Wouldn’t think I was a lawyer, would you?”

“No,” I said, genuinely astonished.

“Pretty good one, too. Not the sort that gets the classy clients, like that bastard Andres Lucas, but I am a lawyer, and I’m out here drinking in the atmosphere so I can plead a case good tomorrow. Sigueiras filed suit on the traffic people—

Angers’ lot—an’ I’m handling it. Name’s Brown. Everyone calls me Fats, even the spicks. Don’t give a damn—I
am
fat.”

He glared at me as though challenging me to deny it.

“Well, thanks for the beer,” I said, getting up and wondering whether I could safely admit that I
was
going to be by here again.

“Oh, hell, that’s okay, Hakluyt. Nothin’ against you. Mucky stinkin’ business, but not your fault. Wouldn’t buy Angers a beer, so help me. But don’t blame me if you’re out of a job before you’re started.”

For a moment I was completely stunned. “How did you know who I was?” I asked at length.

“One of Sigueiras’s boys saw you around here Friday and Saturday. I didn’t. Wasn’t here. Won’t be tomorrow. If you want to buy me that drink, you’ll have to come to the courts. So long.”

He disappeared into the dark entry of the bar; he must have turned back immediately, because I hadn’t taken more than one step away before he was calling me back.

“Oughta warn you,” he said. “These lousy double-crossing sonsabitches at the top won’t pay a cent ’less your plan is just what they wanted anyway. Watch yourself.”

He vanished again—so quickly this time that I suspected his succession of soft drinks must finally have made the matter urgent—and left me to walk very thoughtfully off down the street.

VI

I had been up late the three previous nights, watching the weekend flow of late-night traffic in the main traffic nexus. It appeared that at no time was it dense enough for me to worry about; it consisted mainly of heavy trucks on through journeys and a few cruising taxis. Except for a comparatively small area on the far side of the Plaza del Oeste where nightclubs were concentrated, Vados seemed to close down fairly completely by about one in the morning. There were, of course, parties and theaters and movies and so on which contributed irregular bulges in the flow, but nothing very significant, even on a weekend, on the generous scale of the streets here.